Gaston Bachelard Quotes
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Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.
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Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.
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A pretext-not a cause-is sufficient for us to enter the "solitary situation", the situation of the dreaming solitude. In this solitude, memories arrange themselves in tableaux. Decor takes precedence over drama. Sad memories take on at least the peace of melancholy.
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Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.
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The reverie would not last if it were not nourished by the images of the sweetness of living, by the illusions of happiness.
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The house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace
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The reflected world is the conquest of calm
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The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.
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Very often, I confess, the teller of dreams bores me. His dream could perhaps interest me if it were frankly worked on. But to hear a glorious tale of his insanity! I have not yet clarified, psychoanalytically, this boredom during the recital of other people's dreams. Perhaps I have retained the stiffness of a rationalist. I do not follow the tale of justified incoherence docilely. I always suspect that part of the stupidities being recounted are invented.
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The metaphor is~ an origin, the origin of an image which acts directly, immediately.
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An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem.
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There is no original truth, only original error.
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Any work of science, no matter what its point of departure, cannot become fully convincing until it crosses the boundary between the theoretical and the experimental: Experimentation must give way to argument, and argument must have recourse to experimentation.
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Man is an imagining being.
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All knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself.
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Rilke wrote: 'These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.
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True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.
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A man is a man to the extent that he is a superman. A man should be defined by the sum of those tendencies which impel him to surpass the human condition.
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The mollusk's motto would be: one must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in.
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A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.
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When we are children, people show us so many things that we lose the profound sense of seeing... And just how could adults show us the world they have lost! They know; they think they know; they say they know...
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We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.
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We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.
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The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows.